A Girl Like You by Maureen Lindley Page B

order to vacate their home is delivered to them by Mr. Stedall, the man they now can’t help but associate with bad news.
    “It’s not my doing,” he says, his forehead creased in concern. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
    “What is it now, Mr. Stedall?” Satomi asks.
    “It’s not good, not good at all, I’m afraid.”
    “When was it ever?”
    “November ’41, I guess.”
    The notice of Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien , is issued by something called the Civil Control Administration.
    “Never heard of it, myself,” Mr. Stedall says.
    He has brought the leaflet on his own initiative, knowing that the Baker women don’t go to town these days, where the notices are tacked on poles and shop fronts and are hard to miss. Better they should know and have time to prepare. Mrs. Baker has suffered enough shock for one small woman, surely.
    They have four days to quit their home, four days to leave their farm and their lives. No wonder Mr. Stedall feels bad at being the bearer of such news. No wonder he rocks on his bicycle as he peddles away from them.
    Along with their Japanese neighbors, they are to be sent to a detention camp and must present themselves on the due day at the Angelina assembly area, which turns out to be the hastily renamed bus station, out by the peach-canning factory on the road heading west.
    By Executive Order 9066, Franklin Roosevelt demands that all those of Japanese ancestry, those with any Japanese blood at all, are to be excluded from the entire Pacific coast. That means all of California and most of Oregon and Washington too. It means the Japanese residents of Angelina, and it means Tamura and Satomi.
    Satomi reads the notice to Tamura, the paper trembling in her hand so that the writing blurs and she has to keep starting over. Tamura sits upright and very still in her chair, the formality of the phrasing confusing her. Surely it can’t be true; Satomi has put the emphasis in the wrong place, or she herself has misheard. What is a non-alien other than an American citizen?
    “Are you sure it says that? Can it be possible that it says that?”
    “It does say that, but I’ll read it again slowly, to be certain.”
    When she has finished, Tamura rises from her chair and says quietly, “Yes, that is what it says, then.”
    “How can this man remove us from our home, Mother? Surely he doesn’t have the right, it’s un-American.”
    “He is the president of the United States. We are nothing to him.”
    “Father voted for him didn’t he? He must have trusted him.”
    The shocking news seems too much to be absorbed in one go, but the awful certainty that there is no way out brings them to the edge of hysteria. Something hideous is about to happen to them, something without reason, a horrible thing that they are powerless to stop.
    The questions come, each one prompting another that has no answer.
    “Where will they send us?”
    “What will they do with us?”
    “How will we live?”
    “What will happen to the farm?”
    “We must stay together, whatever happens,” Satomi says. “We mustn’t let them separate us.”
    “No, we must not be separated,” Tamura repeats, while harboring an unspoken terror that even their lives might be in danger.
    In the raw panic that overtakes them, tending the crop seems pointless; even cooking is beyond them. They walk about in circles, the shock the news has brought dragging at their insides. Satomi, as though watching through others’ eyes, sees their pacing as spinning, it’s the nearest thing to spinning, she thinks. By dusk they are tired out. Sliding into static mode, they wait as though on alert for the ice to crack, the sea to swallow them up.
    Sleep is out of the question. Satomi takes herself to her mother’s bed, where they talk and hold each other until dawn breaks and they feel the need for coffee.
    “How will we make coffee at this ‘detention center’?” Tamura asks.
    “I don’t know,